Short Fiction as a Mirror of Palestinian Life in Israel, 1944?1967 : Critique and Anthology

This volume seeks to document the development of the Palestinian short story between 1944 and 1967. This particularly significant phase that carried the seeds, from which the short story grew, was greatly influenced by the last years of the British mandate over Palestine in 1944, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent changes that impacted Palestinian society in this country until the Arabs’ defeat in the Six Day War, 1967.

Within the fold of this volume, the reader will find two parts: the first is a general account of the development of the genre of short fiction and the different approaches that characterized it along with a discussion of the language and an examination of the content. The second is an anthology of twenty-five stories published between 1944 and 1967 by Al-Ittiḥād, an Israeli Arabic-language daily newspaper.

Jamal Assadi, senior lecturer (A), chairs the Department of English and the Department of English for Academic Purposes at Sakhnin College, where he also occupies other key offices. Dr. Assadi previously worked at various colleges in Israel and at An-Najah National University, Nablus. He received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, Dr. Assadi is the author, co-author, editor/co-editor, and translator of a dozen of books on American and Arabic literature, most notably: Acting, Rhetoric and Interpretation in Selected Novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Saul Bellow (2006), A Distant Drummer: Foreign Perspectives on F. Scott Fitzgerald (2007), The Road to Self-Revival: Sufism, Heritage, Intertextuality and Meta-Poetry in Modern Arabic Poetry (2011), The Story of a People: An Anthology of Palestinian Poets Within the Green-Line (2011) and Ibrahim Mālik: The Culture of Peace and Co-existence (2015). He is also a writer of children’s stories.

Saif Abu Saleh is a lecturer of Arabic literature at Sakhnin College and the principal of Technological High School in Sakhnin. Dr. Abu Saleh received his M.A. from Haifa University and his Ph.D. from Tel-Aviv University. Dr. Abu Saleh is a notable scholar of the Arabic literature movement in Israel between 1948 and 2000.